dramahttp://www.thejc.com/news/topics/drama
The taxonomy view with a depth of 0.enMaking a worldwide drama out of Israel TVhttp://www.thejc.com/arts/arts-features/114816/making-a-worldwide-drama-out-israel-tv
<p>It is just over 20 years since, armed with a degree in film and television studies from Tel Aviv University, a fresh-faced Alon Aranya landed in California, determined to make his mark. Many other young Israelis followed the same path, but for Aranya it really paid off. Now 42 and splitting his time between Tel Aviv and Los Angeles, the writer and producer is enjoying a double whammy — the screening of the American version of Israeli thriller series, Hostages, on Channel 4, and the BBC acquisition of the original Israeli production, Bnei Aruba, for broadcast later this year. And on the line from Tel Aviv, Aranya justifiably sounds like the cat who got the cream.</p>
<p>“I pretty much grew up in the US as well as Israel,” he says, “because we went wherever my father was teaching in business school. Besides that, I spent three months in the US every summer, so I grew up watching repeats of American TV shows.” </p>
<p>So he is well versed in the genre of TV in both cultures (and he went on to do a film studies master’s degree at New York University). But, ruefully, Aranya acknowledges the truth outlined by Gideon Raff, one of the devisers of Homeland, another Israeli show given a big bucks American makeover. Israel is simply too small — and too poor — to capitalise on the creative juices of so many of its writers, producers and actors. “The reality is that in Israel there are just five buyers for scripted TV dramas,” he points out. “If five people say no to you, you’re done.”</p>
<p>The only way, therefore, is out. Inspired by the success of shows such as the Emmy-winning Homeland, Prisoners of War and In Treatment — based on Israel’s Betipul — scripts are flooding into Israeli broadcasters in the hope that the formula can be sold on abroad.</p>
<p>In LA, Aranya set up his own company, Scripted World, travelling regularly back to Israel to see if anything could be developed from its TV output. Three years ago he thought he had a winner on his hands when he sold an Israeli show, The Naked Truth, to US broadcasting giant HBO (Sopranos, The Wire, Sex and the City, Game of Thrones). </p>
<p>Though the Americans did not eventually make The Naked Truth, Aranya was undeterred. He asked Israel’s Channel 10 if it had anything else on the stocks and was shown a pitch by two unknown young writers, Omri Givon and Rotem Shamir. Channel 10 told him: “We don’t really know what to do with this. It seems to us to be a very American show.” The pitch was the basic plot of Hostages, in which a woman surgeon, scheduled to operate on her country’s leader — the Israeli prime minister or the US president — is under threat from terrorists who say they will kill her family unless she ensures the politician dies on the operating table.</p>
<p>“I was blown away by this idea,” Aranya recalls. “I loved the power of the concept.” He succeeded in not only selling Hostages to Warner Brothers but co-wrote the pilot episode with Jeffrey Nachmanoff. After winning a bidding war with Fox, CBS commissioned the series and it was only at that stage that Israeli TV decided to proceed with its version — the first time, he adds laughing, “that a remake got made and screened before the original”.</p>
<p>The two shows are markedly different. The American adaptation is 15 hour-long episodes, starring Australian actress Toni Collette as the terrified but tough woman surgeon, and well-known US film and TV actor Dylan McDermott as the chief terrorist. All the characters have strong back stories which unfold throughout the series — the doctor’s husband’s affair with his assistant, the teenage daughter’s pregnancy and the teenage son’s burgeoning cannabis dealing business were all trailed in the opener, shown here at the weekend. And, most powerfully, what motivates the kidnappers’ leader, a rogue FBI agent.</p>
<p>In the Israeli series — for which the BBC is yet to confirm a transmission date — the surgeon and terrorist are portrayed by actors who have tasted Hollywood success; Ayelet Zurer and Jonah Lotan (the latter has featured in 24 and Homeland). There are just 10 shorter episodes and almost all the drama is psychological and intimate — reflecting both cultural differences and financial restraints, Aranya says. “The two versions were pretty much the same coming out of the gate, but after the first couple of episodes they began to feel very different.” </p>
<p>Aranya also wrote episode seven of the American version and is evidently passionate about the character of the surgeon, Ellen Sanders. “Here’s a woman with a great career who has paid a price for it. When we meet her, her marriage seems to be on the rocks and she is challenged to choose between her family and her career.” </p>
<p>Although “one of the hottest pilots of the season”, Hostages did not achieve high ratings in the States, which Aranya attributes in part to being up against a ratings-busting reality show. He is confident that the format can sustain a second season — albeit probably not in Israel.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Israel’s panoply of “you’ll never believe this” stories continues to be a rich seam for him to mine. He is currently working on a series purchased by US cable station TNT. Inspired by the coma of Ariel Sharon, President X ponders what would have happened if Sharon had emerged from it. For America, “the idea is that a US president is attacked and left for dead. He is put into an artificial coma and wakes up with the aim of finding out who tried to kill him”. Warner Brothers will again be producing the show.</p>
<p>Hostages is on C4 at 9pm on Saturday</p>Arts featuresIsraelTVdrama114816storyhttp://www.thejc.com/files/Hostages 1.jpg

Our lips are sealed: Hostages stars Dylan McDermott and Toni Collette

66421Israeli autism drama to get the Homeland treatment104070Israeli Arab wins TV talent show in Israel
It is just over 20 years since, armed with a degree in film and television studies from Tel Aviv University, a fresh-faced Alon Aranya landed in California, determined to make his mark. Many other young Israelis followed the same path, but for Aranya it really paid off. Now 42 and splitting his time between Tel Aviv and Los Angeles, the writer and producer is enjoying a double whammy — the screening of the American version of Israeli thriller series, Hostages, on Channel 4, and the BBC acquisition of the original Israeli production, Bnei Aruba, for broadcast later this year. And on the line from Tel Aviv, Aranya justifiably sounds like the cat who got the cream.
“I pretty much grew up in the US as well as Israel,” he says, “because we went wherever my father was teaching in business school. Besides that, I spent three months in the US every summer, so I grew up watching repeats of American TV shows.”
So he is well versed in the genre of TV in both cultures (and he went on to do a film studies master’s degree at New York University). But, ruefully, Aranya acknowledges the truth outlined by Gideon Raff, one of the devisers of Homeland, another Israeli show given a big bucks American makeover. Israel is simply too small — and too poor — to capitalise on the creative juices of so many of its writers, producers and actors. “The reality is that in Israel there are just five buyers for scripted TV dramas,” he points out. “If five people say no to you, you’re done.”
The only way, therefore, is out. Inspired by the success of shows such as the Emmy-winning Homeland, Prisoners of War and In Treatment — based on Israel’s Betipul — scripts are flooding into Israeli broadcasters in the hope that the formula can be sold on abroad.
In LA, Aranya set up his own company, Scripted World, travelling regularly back to Israel to see if anything could be developed from its TV output. Three years ago he thought he had a winner on his hands when he sold an Israeli show, The Naked Truth, to US broadcasting giant HBO (Sopranos, The Wire, Sex and the City, Game of Thrones).
Though the Americans did not eventually make The Naked Truth, Aranya was undeterred. He asked Israel’s Channel 10 if it had anything else on the stocks and was shown a pitch by two unknown young writers, Omri Givon and Rotem Shamir. Channel 10 told him: “We don’t really know what to do with this. It seems to us to be a very American show.” The pitch was the basic plot of Hostages, in which a woman surgeon, scheduled to operate on her country’s leader — the Israeli prime minister or the US president — is under threat from terrorists who say they will kill her family unless she ensures the politician dies on the operating table.
“I was blown away by this idea,” Aranya recalls. “I loved the power of the concept.” He succeeded in not only selling Hostages to Warner Brothers but co-wrote the pilot episode with Jeffrey Nachmanoff. After winning a bidding war with Fox, CBS commissioned the series and it was only at that stage that Israeli TV decided to proceed with its version — the first time, he adds laughing, “that a remake got made and screened before the original”.
The two shows are markedly different. The American adaptation is 15 hour-long episodes, starring Australian actress Toni Collette as the terrified but tough woman surgeon, and well-known US film and TV actor Dylan McDermott as the chief terrorist. All the characters have strong back stories which unfold throughout the series — the doctor’s husband’s affair with his assistant, the teenage daughter’s pregnancy and the teenage son’s burgeoning cannabis dealing business were all trailed in the opener, shown here at the weekend. And, most powerfully, what motivates the kidnappers’ leader, a rogue FBI agent.
In the Israeli series — for which the BBC is yet to confirm a transmission date — the surgeon and terrorist are portrayed by actors who have tasted Hollywood success; Ayelet Zurer and Jonah Lotan (the latter has featured in 24 and Homeland). There are just 10 shorter episodes and almost all the drama is psychological and intimate — reflecting both cultural differences and financial restraints, Aranya says. “The two versions were pretty much the same coming out of the gate, but after the first couple of episodes they began to feel very different.”
Aranya also wrote episode seven of the American version and is evidently passionate about the character of the surgeon, Ellen Sanders. “Here’s a woman with a great career who has paid a price for it. When we meet her, her marriage seems to be on the rocks and she is challenged to choose between her family and her career.”
Although “one of the hottest pilots of the season”, Hostages did not achieve high ratings in the States, which Aranya attributes in part to being up against a ratings-busting reality show. He is confident that the format can sustain a second season — albeit probably not in Israel.
Meanwhile, Israel’s panoply of “you’ll never believe this” stories continues to be a rich seam for him to mine. He is currently working on a series purchased by US cable station TNT. Inspired by the coma of Ariel Sharon, President X ponders what would have happened if Sharon had emerged from it. For America, “the idea is that a US president is attacked and left for dead. He is put into an artificial coma and wakes up with the aim of finding out who tried to kill him”. Warner Brothers will again be producing the show.
Hostages is on C4 at 9pm on Saturday
Thu, 16 Jan 2014 11:57:34 +0000Jenni Frazer114816 at http://www.thejc.comAmerican Psycho Review - A sophisticated productionhttp://www.thejc.com/arts/arts-features/114217/american-psycho-review-a-sophisticated-production
<p>Matt Smith packs more defined pecs than you might expect of a former Doctor Who. The ripped torso rises out of the Almeida’s stage as smoothly as a cassette ejecting from a high-end, late-20th-century tape deck. Smith is the latest incarnation of Patrick Bateman, who lives in the raging materialism of late-20th-century New York and whose favourite objects include his Sony Walkman and his body.</p>
<p>Resurrected for Rupert Goold’s inaugural production as the Almeida Theatre’s chief, this is the latest incarnation of Bateman, the serial-killer banker at the centre of Bret Easton Ellis’s chilling 1991 novel, and also the movie that followed starring Christian Bale. </p>
<p>Smith’s version gets less scary as the evening goes on, not because the actor doesn’t convince as the pitiless heart of the show. It is just that, unlike Ellis, Goold is more interested in seducing his audience than in disturbing them.</p>
<p>The murders are easy on the eye. Blood red looks good against the gleaming white minimalism of Es Devlin’s set. I don’t buy the point made in the programme by Mary Harron, director of the movie version, that the extreme violence of the book is as unsuited to the stage as it is to film. On stage, you don’t have to be as graphic as on film. There are subtle ways to show, suggest and describe horror, even when the subject concerns the sadistic use of rats. And the most horrifying of the novel’s killings don’t make the final cut in Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s book.</p>
<p>Composer and lyric writer Duncan Sheik (who co-wrote the best musical score this century for the show Spring Awakening) doesn’t attempt to rouse with stirring anthems. Rather his music washes over you like one of Bateman’s exfoliating balms.</p>
<p>Smith’s singing voice is the perfect match — an utterly soulless low-fi drawl. Anything more dynamic would have suggested an emotional life in Bateman that just does not exist, Ellis’s point being the man’s emptiness and the vacuity of his needs. It’s a condition defined by the sharpest suits, the most elegant style, the most confident bearing — and promoted by the death sentences he carries out on anyone who makes him feel less than the best.<br />
There is fellow banker Paul Owen (terrifically played by Ben Aldridge with relentless sang-froid), whom Bateman admires even though Owen constantly mistakes him for someone else. So he has to die. And then there’s Bethany, the girlfriend who fatally notices that the modern art in Bateman’s apartment is upside down. She’s got to go, too.</p>
<p>Bateman’s peers are equally shallow, if less psychotic. At a dinner party, some of them prove that they have interests beyond their clique by expressing sorrow for those caught by conflict in Sri Lanka. “It’s appalling what the Sikhs are doing to the Israelis there.”</p>
<p>Has Goold done justice to Ellis? I doubt Ellis would think so. For starters, there is not enough fear generated. But there’s no doubt that this is vintage work by the director. No current show feels more sophisticated and urbane — qualities in which Goold has excelled with shows such as Enron and the 9/11 play, Decade. This one positively drips with irony. </p>
<p>Although none of it is enough to make you care much about the fate of those on stage — a little like Bateman. </p>Arts featuresdrama114217storyhttp://www.thejc.com/files/psycho.JPG

Opposing views: Matt Smith and Jonathan Bailey

Matt Smith packs more defined pecs than you might expect of a former Doctor Who. The ripped torso rises out of the Almeida’s stage as smoothly as a cassette ejecting from a high-end, late-20th-century tape deck. Smith is the latest incarnation of Patrick Bateman, who lives in the raging materialism of late-20th-century New York and whose favourite objects include his Sony Walkman and his body.
Resurrected for Rupert Goold’s inaugural production as the Almeida Theatre’s chief, this is the latest incarnation of Bateman, the serial-killer banker at the centre of Bret Easton Ellis’s chilling 1991 novel, and also the movie that followed starring Christian Bale.
Smith’s version gets less scary as the evening goes on, not because the actor doesn’t convince as the pitiless heart of the show. It is just that, unlike Ellis, Goold is more interested in seducing his audience than in disturbing them.
The murders are easy on the eye. Blood red looks good against the gleaming white minimalism of Es Devlin’s set. I don’t buy the point made in the programme by Mary Harron, director of the movie version, that the extreme violence of the book is as unsuited to the stage as it is to film. On stage, you don’t have to be as graphic as on film. There are subtle ways to show, suggest and describe horror, even when the subject concerns the sadistic use of rats. And the most horrifying of the novel’s killings don’t make the final cut in Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s book.
Composer and lyric writer Duncan Sheik (who co-wrote the best musical score this century for the show Spring Awakening) doesn’t attempt to rouse with stirring anthems. Rather his music washes over you like one of Bateman’s exfoliating balms.
Smith’s singing voice is the perfect match — an utterly soulless low-fi drawl. Anything more dynamic would have suggested an emotional life in Bateman that just does not exist, Ellis’s point being the man’s emptiness and the vacuity of his needs. It’s a condition defined by the sharpest suits, the most elegant style, the most confident bearing — and promoted by the death sentences he carries out on anyone who makes him feel less than the best.
There is fellow banker Paul Owen (terrifically played by Ben Aldridge with relentless sang-froid), whom Bateman admires even though Owen constantly mistakes him for someone else. So he has to die. And then there’s Bethany, the girlfriend who fatally notices that the modern art in Bateman’s apartment is upside down. She’s got to go, too.
Bateman’s peers are equally shallow, if less psychotic. At a dinner party, some of them prove that they have interests beyond their clique by expressing sorrow for those caught by conflict in Sri Lanka. “It’s appalling what the Sikhs are doing to the Israelis there.”
Has Goold done justice to Ellis? I doubt Ellis would think so. For starters, there is not enough fear generated. But there’s no doubt that this is vintage work by the director. No current show feels more sophisticated and urbane — qualities in which Goold has excelled with shows such as Enron and the 9/11 play, Decade. This one positively drips with irony.
Although none of it is enough to make you care much about the fate of those on stage — a little like Bateman.
Fri, 20 Dec 2013 16:40:24 +0000John Nathan114217 at http://www.thejc.comIt's Soho, but not as we now know ithttp://www.thejc.com/arts/theatre/113271/its-soho-not-we-now-know-it
<p>Mojo<br />
Harold Pinter Theatre, London SW1</p>
<p>Before Jez Butterworth cast the countryside as the mysterious and lawless territory of his plays, the place populated by the scallywags of this, his 1995 debut, was Soho. Not the safe fashionista Soho of today, home to film companies and media multinationals with employees called Django, but the vice-ridden Soho of 1958 with crooks called Sweets, Potts, Baby, Skinny and Mickey.<br />
All of them work for the unseen Ezra, the Jewish owner of Ezra’s Atlantic club in Dean Street, in which Butterworth sets the action. We never see Ezra, but his violently unhinged son Baby — played by a whippet-thin Ben Whishaw — stalks the place with the arrogance of an heir, and sometimes a sword.<br />
The venue has a new act in the shape of a blond Elvis called Silver Johnny, a hot property who might break America with the help of Kray-like hoodlums and their contacts in showbiz. The deal is being struck in the Atlantic’s back room upstairs. We know the stakes are high because Potts (Daniel Mays) and Sweets (Rupert Grint) — supplier of pills that make the taker’s time go fast and urine turn black — are seriously on edge.<br />
Potts, who discovered Silver Johnny in a Camden joint run by a “wop” called Luigi, wants his cut of the spoils. And everyone is wired to the hilt by Sweet’s sweets.<br />
The deal — also unseen by us — goes fatally wrong. Silver Johnny is now owned by the competition and the play lurches towards a kind of Soho Alamo in which Ezra’s boys steel themselves for an attack on the Atlantic.<br />
But Butterworth’s long-time collaborator Ian Rickson — who directed the original production — knows that the real meat and pleasure of this play is not the thriller plot, though that never hurts, but the vaulting language and slang with which everyone but the more lyrical Baby speaks. Butterworth knows it every bit as well as Damon Runyon knew how the Chicago hoodlums of Guys and Dolls spoke. Here, it becomes the weapon used by gangsters against each other to avoid becoming the runt of the pack.<br />
As Potts, Mays delivers the Cockney physically as much as verbally. He bends and bows and accompanies the dialogue with the gesticulations of a tic-tac bookmaker on speed. Whishaw’s Baby, meanwhile, is a study of two kinds of terrifying — watchful and rampaging. It’s a superbly acted evening.<br />
No one is more outstanding than Colin Morgan’s gofer Skinny, a small-time antisemite who is infinitely more vulnerable than the Jew he directs jibes at. And, for followers of Butterworth, this revival reveals an unexpected narrative from Soho to Jerusalem, a kind of hard-nosed lament for an unruly world before it was opened up to respectability by laws and lattes.</p>
<p>LISTEN WE’RE FAMILY<br />
JW3, London NW3</p>
<p>l Few shows hold a mirror up to its audience as sympathetically and unforgivingly as JW3’s first play. Constructed from interviews of mainly London Jews by director Matthew Lloyd and writer/actor Kerry Shale, all of Jewish family life is represented here — or a lot of it at any rate. The cast — Tom Berish, Shale, Maggie Steed and Isy Suttie — simultaneously listen to (through headphones) and perform the voices of those interviewed. Subjects include a 91-year-old barber whose remembrances are delivered with lessons in Yiddish; a Crohn’s disease sufferer whose life project is to give her children the security that she never experienced; an elderly East End widow who lives with the weight and guilt of her husband’s suicide and a gay Jewish man who stays in touch with his heritage with regular bagel-buying outings to Brick Lane.<br />
t’s not the first time this technique has been used to inform a play with a sense of super-realism. As the first theatre production to be commissioned by what has to be the most exciting cultural centre to open in London in recent times, Listen, We’re Family sets a high bar for the shows that will follow it. Sometimes the quirks and eccentricities recreated by this excellent cast – no doubt accurately - encourage us to laugh at the subjects rather than with them in a way that can feel like a betrayal of their trust. But as a form of play-making it works really well and that’s what counts. And there is an honesty about this funny and at times deeply touching portrait of a community that does justice to the openness with which the interviewees talk about their lives and families – and by extension, ours too.</p>Theatredrama113271storyhttp://www.thejc.com/files/Ben Whishaw (Baby) in Mojo at the Harold Pinter Theatre. Photo credit Simon Annand.jpg

Ben Whishaw

94137Spectacle, drama and singing nuns - welcome to the world of Meyerbeer66421Israeli autism drama to get the Homeland treatment
Mojo
Harold Pinter Theatre, London SW1
Before Jez Butterworth cast the countryside as the mysterious and lawless territory of his plays, the place populated by the scallywags of this, his 1995 debut, was Soho. Not the safe fashionista Soho of today, home to film companies and media multinationals with employees called Django, but the vice-ridden Soho of 1958 with crooks called Sweets, Potts, Baby, Skinny and Mickey.
All of them work for the unseen Ezra, the Jewish owner of Ezra’s Atlantic club in Dean Street, in which Butterworth sets the action. We never see Ezra, but his violently unhinged son Baby — played by a whippet-thin Ben Whishaw — stalks the place with the arrogance of an heir, and sometimes a sword.
The venue has a new act in the shape of a blond Elvis called Silver Johnny, a hot property who might break America with the help of Kray-like hoodlums and their contacts in showbiz. The deal is being struck in the Atlantic’s back room upstairs. We know the stakes are high because Potts (Daniel Mays) and Sweets (Rupert Grint) — supplier of pills that make the taker’s time go fast and urine turn black — are seriously on edge.
Potts, who discovered Silver Johnny in a Camden joint run by a “wop” called Luigi, wants his cut of the spoils. And everyone is wired to the hilt by Sweet’s sweets.
The deal — also unseen by us — goes fatally wrong. Silver Johnny is now owned by the competition and the play lurches towards a kind of Soho Alamo in which Ezra’s boys steel themselves for an attack on the Atlantic.
But Butterworth’s long-time collaborator Ian Rickson — who directed the original production — knows that the real meat and pleasure of this play is not the thriller plot, though that never hurts, but the vaulting language and slang with which everyone but the more lyrical Baby speaks. Butterworth knows it every bit as well as Damon Runyon knew how the Chicago hoodlums of Guys and Dolls spoke. Here, it becomes the weapon used by gangsters against each other to avoid becoming the runt of the pack.
As Potts, Mays delivers the Cockney physically as much as verbally. He bends and bows and accompanies the dialogue with the gesticulations of a tic-tac bookmaker on speed. Whishaw’s Baby, meanwhile, is a study of two kinds of terrifying — watchful and rampaging. It’s a superbly acted evening.
No one is more outstanding than Colin Morgan’s gofer Skinny, a small-time antisemite who is infinitely more vulnerable than the Jew he directs jibes at. And, for followers of Butterworth, this revival reveals an unexpected narrative from Soho to Jerusalem, a kind of hard-nosed lament for an unruly world before it was opened up to respectability by laws and lattes.
LISTEN WE’RE FAMILY
JW3, London NW3
l Few shows hold a mirror up to its audience as sympathetically and unforgivingly as JW3’s first play. Constructed from interviews of mainly London Jews by director Matthew Lloyd and writer/actor Kerry Shale, all of Jewish family life is represented here — or a lot of it at any rate. The cast — Tom Berish, Shale, Maggie Steed and Isy Suttie — simultaneously listen to (through headphones) and perform the voices of those interviewed. Subjects include a 91-year-old barber whose remembrances are delivered with lessons in Yiddish; a Crohn’s disease sufferer whose life project is to give her children the security that she never experienced; an elderly East End widow who lives with the weight and guilt of her husband’s suicide and a gay Jewish man who stays in touch with his heritage with regular bagel-buying outings to Brick Lane.
t’s not the first time this technique has been used to inform a play with a sense of super-realism. As the first theatre production to be commissioned by what has to be the most exciting cultural centre to open in London in recent times, Listen, We’re Family sets a high bar for the shows that will follow it. Sometimes the quirks and eccentricities recreated by this excellent cast – no doubt accurately - encourage us to laugh at the subjects rather than with them in a way that can feel like a betrayal of their trust. But as a form of play-making it works really well and that’s what counts. And there is an honesty about this funny and at times deeply touching portrait of a community that does justice to the openness with which the interviewees talk about their lives and families – and by extension, ours too.
Mon, 18 Nov 2013 11:37:02 +0000John Nathan113271 at http://www.thejc.com